State Officials Dogging Owners Of Untagged Pets

Eleven Allentown residents were cited Thursday for not having their dogs licensed during a door-to-door check in parts of the city by state dog law enforcement officials and police.

Charles Crawford, state dog warden in Lehigh County, said two teams of four people each combed parts of the city looking for households with unlicensed dogs. He said many of their calls were based on complaints.

"We're not trying to issue a lot of citations," he said. "We just want to curb the problem of dogs running at large through the city."

Fines for unlicensed dogs can range up to a maximum of $300 plus costs.

Crawford said his office and the city police will be conducting the inspections periodically throughout the summer.

Last summer, the American Civil Liberties Union had questioned the tactics used by dog law enforcement personnel in inspecting homes for unlicensed dogs.

The union felt the inspections violated the homeowner's constitutional rights.

A spokesman in the ACLU Philadelphia office said Thursday, however, that no one has brought a lawsuit against the state and that the issue has more or less faded.

Donald Moul, the state director of the Bureau of Dog Law Enforcement, said the method of inspecting homes has not changed since questions were raised by the ACLU. "What we're doing is something we've been doing for 10 or 15 years," he said. If the publicity surrounding the ACLU charges has done nothing else, he said, it has caused more people to register their dogs.

He said a million licences were issued in the statelast year, making it one of only three years in the bureau's history that that many licenses were issued.